Michael Proposes to Lisa Marie
It was difficult to imagine how things could get much worse for Michael Jackson in the fall of 1993. In just a matter of months he had, without a doubt, experienced the ‘swift and sudden fall from grace’, he would later write about in his self-revealing song, ‘Stranger in Moscow’.
Certainly, no one had counted on Michael becoming addicted to drugs, thereby raising the stakes in terms of the precarious nature of his future and well-being. Yet, anxious, unable to sleep and, he said, in pain because of dental work and a recent surgery to his scalp (a consequence of the burn he suffered during that Pepsi commercial), Michael began taking more of the painkillers, Percodan, Demerol and codeine, as well as tranquillizers Valium, Xanax and Ativan. Such dependence was uncharted terrain for him. In the past, he had made an effort to not over-medicate during recovery from plastic surgeries, explaining to doctors that he wanted to remain ‘sharp’ for the purpose of making sound business and career decisions. However, with all that was going on in his life at this time, Michael no longer cared to be quite so focused. In fact, he wanted to forget, escape. It didn’t take long before he was completely dependent on the drugs. It happened so quickly that his team in the United States didn’t even realize what was going on with Michael, until it was too late to do anything about it.
Everyone was stunned to learn that Michael had a problem with drugs. Of course, Elizabeth Taylor understood and had empathy for his plight. She’d been there, with her own, well-publicized battles. Lisa Marie Presley was also sympathetic; she, too, was a recovering addict.
‘When I was a teenager, I was completely out of control,’ she told me. ‘I started doing drugs when I was fourteen. I had been spinning for quite some time, years, when I finally hit bottom. That was when I found myself on a seventy-two-hour bender of cocaine, sedatives, pot and drinking, all at the same time. I woke up and there were all of these people, friends of mine, passed out on the floor. My coke dealer was in the room trying to sell me more stuff. I just said, ‘That’s it. Everybody get the fuck out.’ I don’t know whyI got addicted, I just know that I was going to die if I didn’t get help. Finally, my mother and I decided I would go to the Scientology Center in Hollywood for detoxification. It saved my life.’
When Michael telephoned Lisa from overseas in September 1993, he was high, incoherent and delusional. Alarmed, Lisa attempted to convince Michael to do as she had once done, enter a rehabilitation centre. For Lisa, the quest to pull a drug-addled superstar back from the edge had great significance. She had shared with friends earlier the guilt she had suffered as a child, seeing her father falling into his own bottomless pit of addiction. She was still married to Danny Keough, but unhappily. She was restless and felt that she had no real purpose; she wanted more than motherhood, she said. Michael’s dilemma seemed to provide an outlet for her. ‘Absolutely, I felt that I had a
responsibility
to save him,’ she said. ‘I don’t know the psychology of it and what it had to do with my father. I only know what I felt.’
There was one major obstacle that lay before Lisa if she was going to help quiet the demons haunting Michael: access. It was well known that Jackson had done a very thorough job of insulating himself from the outside world. Often, he would start casual relationships with people, many of whom were certain that their relationship would grow, only to find that Michael had left them behind. Calls would go unanswered, sometimes letters would be returned, unread. Lisa had heard of Michael’s reputation for tossing aside new-found ‘soul mates’, and saw this pattern as a liability if she was going to complete her task of rebuilding his crumbling life. She would have to proceed with caution.
In her frequent telephone calls to him, Lisa maintained that Michael could not go on much longer with his personal life and career in such disarray. He was immobilized by uncertainty and a sense of hopelessness, which had contributed to his addiction. She suggested to him the idea others in his camp had begun to secretly discuss: that Michael end his misery with a cash settlement to Evan Chandler. Michael was, predictably, against the idea. A man who’d been building an image for himself since the time most children were building tree houses, Michael cared deeply about what people thought of him. Even if the image he had fostered over the years was, arguably, not the best one for him, it
was
the result of a great deal of strategizing on his part, and on that of his handlers. ‘He felt that this thing of him being wacky and weird and crazy worked for him,’ Lisa recalled, ‘and maybe for a time, it did. I don’t know. I was always against it. I always thought he was bigger, better, than the image. I always thought the image did him an injustice.’
One thing was certain: by 1993 Michael was lonelier than he’d ever before been, and that was really saying something. He had to face the fact that his career, his most enduring passion, was in jeopardy, a possible fatality either of an unlawful, immoral love affair with a minor or of poor judgement in having aligned himself so stubbornly with the wrong people and at the wrong time. If he wouldn’t settle with money, Lisa suggested rehab at the very least. She cared deeply about him, she told him, and she wanted to be sure he knew it.
One night, while abroad, Michael found himself, as he often would, feeling trapped in a plush hotel suite, alone with the constant drone of a chanting crowd below his room. After a string of phone calls from lawyers and publicists, Michael decided to calm himself by calling the one person who could somehow help him forget that his career hung in the balance: Lisa.
She had certainly been persistent in her pursuit of him. She left telephone numbers for a house she was renting in Canoga Park, California.
She also left the number of the new three-acre estate which she had just purchased and was getting ready to occupy on Long Valley Road in Hidden Hills (an exclusive gate-guarded equestrian community in Calabasas, California, where she still lives, today).
Then, just to be sure, she left the number where she could be reached in Clearwater, Florida, where she was planning to spend time at the Scientology retreat. She even sent him party balloons with messages attached. Somehow, she could always put a smile on his face, even if it was just her raspy voice proclaiming, ‘Oh, fuck them!’ He found her in Canoga Park.
Michael valued Lisa’s settling effect on him, so much so that during his phone conversation, he posed a question that surprised both of them. ‘If I asked you to marry me, would you do it?’ Was this a joke? A hypothetical? Or was it a dare for Lisa to take him seriously? If it was a dare, Lisa was just the woman to take it – even though she was still married to Danny Keough. Without missing a beat, she replied, ‘I would do it.’ Michael didn’t say a word, at first. He then said, ‘Hold on, I have to use the bathroom.’
When he finally did speak into the phone again, he was speaking to his new fiancée. ‘My love for you is real,’ Michael told Lisa. ‘Please believe me.’ Michael didn’t realize, however, that whether or not Michael loved her wasn’t the
real
issue for Lisa. His proposal served a greater purpose. It would give her access, she hoped, to enter his secret world. Then, from the inside, she would begin to put the pieces of this broken man together, and this time she would not fail.